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A good rule with artifacts is to make them thematic. So, ranger bow. A good artifact isn't just strong, it's also interesting and expands your tool box. Tracking on a hit is good, but it's a good start. The real question, I think, ends up being "what can rangers not do, that would be loving rad to do, that fits a bow?" Another good rule is that you should mercilessly steal from everywhere else. So, a few ideas that should hopefully still fit that I have brainstormed up real quick: SPY BOW: * Rather then "tracking" on a hit, it creates a link to the ranger. x times per y, the ranger can activate that link and begin seeing, hearing, and indeed engaging in all (or most if you don't wanna) of the target's senses; you see what they see, hear what they hear, etc. While this might seem like more of a rogue thing, I think it would still work great for most rangers. Your enemies "escape," only to find they've unwittingly given you all of their secrets. * To go along with that, the bow grants permanent true sight (is that even still a thing?) to it's wielder. If that ISN'T a thing, the wielder automatically sees through illusions and invisibility magics. Wizards don't get their get-out-of-jail-free-cards when this bow is around. Nobody can evade the spy's eyes. * Throw on a vision type or two, that fits. * As so far this is all utility, for the finale, maybe the bow does more damage the more you know about someone. Maybe it's extra exploitative on weaknesses? Point is, a good finale would be to boost your "do poo poo in combat" ability based on combining it with the "use the bow's utility stuff." * Or if you wanna play with it, maybe they can turn crits into domination effects. Instead of doing the extra damage (or on top of it; not sure how the balance would work out), they gotta save as if you cast a dominate spell on 'em. LIGHTNING BOW * Lightning is cool and shooting lightning is cool, too. Arrows fired by the bow do electricity damage whenever it's beneficial. * Resistances to electricity, and maybe penetrate at least some electricity resistance * When YOU are zapped by electric damage, the bow supercharges and does way more damage, and/or if you wanna get real crazy, grants it's wielder an extra action (NOTE: THIS IS POTENTIALLY REAL STRONG) * x times per y, it can be fired directly into the air to create a thunderstorm. Lightning may or may not be directly targeted; your call. * Maybe x times per y, the wielder turns a single normal attack into a line attack? This is frankly a great thing to just jam into potentially any ranged weapon. Who doesn't like to shoot an arrow right through a fucker and hit a different fucker? Nobody. It's always fun. Note: most of this could also be a fun thing to give as magic arrows, alternately, instead. NATURE/ANTIMAGIC BOW * Additional poison damage that nothing is immune to. Name it "rot" damage instead, because all things decay, and you're here to drat well make sure of it. * I like stuff that kicks in to make a cool moment even more cool, so maybe enemies you drop with this bow turn into loving freaky-rear end fungoid creatures under your control for a round before they drop dead. Or explode into spores! * Damage dealt by the bow cannot be healed outside of druidic magic, 'cause gently caress you. This probably is 99% ribbon ability, but it's still a fun and thematic thing. * In fact, consider making this "druidic magic is tired of wizards and priests and their poo poo" and have it disrupt non-druidic magic by giving a penalty to concentration checks to anyone it hits, and maybe just straight up dispelling magic for utility purposes. * While we're shouting "gently caress you!" to things, it's extra potent against aberrations and undead and demons and their like, because of how unnatural and frankly unwelcome to our Prime Material Plane they are. * Maybe let it's wielder dispel/purge magic without shooting it, to give it more beneficial utility. Evil dark eldritch curses? Sorry buddy, this is our planet; go back to I Can't Believe It's Not Yith with that bullshit. LOTS OF ELEMENTS BOW * Changes damage type constantly. Let them control this. * Give damage types bonuses beyond just "does that damage." Fire arrows light poo poo on fire. Ice arrows freeze stuff. Go browse through Thief's arrows (as in the game Thief), or glance at elemental effects in the Divinity: Original Sin series on how to give them some pizzazz. * Speaking of, let it combo! Shoot a water arrow and then shoot a lightning arrow! Cover them in oil and then set them on fire! * This bow is pretty simple in design but intended to open up a lot in the form of comboing effects. Honestly, you probably don't need to do more beyond just come up with the elemental effects and how they'd work, and work together. Freezing poo poo on command or growing up climbing vines (that would otherwise grapple enemies) likewise is decent utility. Maybe as they level up, the bow gets stronger effects. At first, the you got maybe just fire and water. By the end, you're shooting out time arrows that send targets forward in time by a small amount (like a few rounds), or
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Nov 2, 2018 04:48
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dreadmojo posted:If your enjoyment of the game is being affected by your character not having a magic weapon talk to your dm who is an adult human like yourself It's weird, I can't remember what part of the book tells players to give their DMs notes on what kind of magic items they want. I mean, it's gotta be there for this to be a valid solution, I just can't seem to find it.
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Nov 3, 2018 03:16
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The difference between making a bridge of roots for people to dash across to attack enemies, and throwing a magic weapon enchantment on the fighter's weapon, is the first is using spells in a creative way to get around an interesting problem (the enemies are There and I'm not), whereas the second is checking off a box to continue playing. There's no puzzle to be solved with in an enemy that can only be hurt by magic weapons. There's no clever thinking. It's a purely binary check point. It's a "YOU MUST BE THIS MAGICAL TO GO ON THIS RIDE" sign, and you either pass it, or you don't. Take that earlier example. Enemies are on a platform away from us. What can we do? Well, we can use effects to negate the problem, use effects that bring us closer, or we can use effects that bring the enemies closer. Root bridge is the first one - using a spell to create a bridge, nullifying the problem of "there's a gap between us." You could also do it with mundane measures; a rogue is tossed across and uses their thievery bonus action to connect a bridge on the other side, or the ranger fires a rope across, or etc, etc. The second one is easier; teleport across, or just loving jump across and murder everything on the other side. And the last, again, has plenty of solutions on how to get enemies from A to B. That's why it's a (potentially) interesting problem - because the fun ends up being "how will the players decide to act?" But the magic weapon problem? What are the solutions? "Have a magic weapon." Ok, not something you can really do spur of the moment. "Cast Magic Weapon spell." So this is a problem with literally a single spell solution? There's nothing interesting about this problem, because it is, again, just a box you check off. And it's maddening because WotC refuses to admit the box is there, even as they develop around it's existence.
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Nov 3, 2018 20:19
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Magil Zeal posted:There's definitely a perception out there that a fighter putting out "big numbers" is somehow on the edge of breaking the system. This is just reminding me of people during 3.x who thought sneak attack was super powerful because you get to roll SO MANY DICE! (and then never actually run the numbers on what those dice are actually gonna give you). Alternately, it reminds me of how many people constantly throw themselves into DPS classes in MMOs and are absolute garbage at them because they're blinded by big numbers. What I'm saying is, human beings are really loving bad with numbers and their context, and nerds are, perhaps hilariously, often especially bad with numbers and their context. ( Also how it's bullshit that "Fighters don't have to be good at anything else because they're the best at fighting!" when people still get upset when they even so much as perceive that fighters might actually be the best at fighting )
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Nov 16, 2018 19:24
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The thing to remember is that, for a lot of people, the more complicated something sounds, the more potent it's assumed to be. It's why so many dumb grogs thought massive multiclassing was overpowered in 3e and would list absurd builds with ten different classes as things they had to ban - when anyone who actually thought about how that would play for more then two seconds would realize how witheringly weak it'd be.
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Nov 18, 2018 00:05
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"Your attacks can be used at [range]" is pretty straightforward, really.
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Nov 20, 2018 00:53
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AlphaDog posted:Because I would have assumed that with ~40 fiction books it might have the exact same problems. But then I went and looked and there's over three hundred loving Forgotten Realms books. Unlike FR, the Eberron fiction is also explicitly non-canonical "unless you want it to be canon."
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Dec 5, 2018 15:32
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Kender very literally exist because of Mormonism.
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Dec 5, 2018 19:22
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Hickman is a devout Mormon and had issues with there being a literal "thief" class, but also needed something to replace the role in Dragonlance, and so he invented Kender, who are thieves, but aren't really thieves, making them morally OK, uh, somehow. The pure insanity of Kender exist due to Hickman essentially trying to loophole and rules lawyer their own religious morality into allowing a D&D class/race that could handle all the trappings of the "thief" class without being an actual thief.
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Dec 5, 2018 19:42
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The thing with magic as it goes with Black Company is that it assumes you can in fact use magic to make yourself more or less invincible. You ain't gotta have magic that do that, though. More or less all those assumptions die the second mages can, uh, also die. Like this is where basically all the assumptions fall flat. Magic does what you say it does, and that's it. You don't need magic to be all powerful and all pervasive. You don't need magic to be so powerful that "i can learn magic" equates to "IT'S GOD TIME." And honestly, super powerful can do anything magic is one of the least interesting things you can put into a setting.
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Dec 7, 2018 18:58
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It is weird that the complaint for 4e is "the players had to pay attention during the game" Yo if your players are just zoning out during combat, D&D is probably not the right game for your group. But then, we've always known that. Insert my loving repetitive bullshit about D&D naturally becoming freeform here.
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Dec 21, 2018 06:05
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Ryuujin posted:The important thing to remember is Paizo didn't copy it, they probably couldn't because it wasn't included in the open gaming content, and also they would probably have done a poor job of it. I mean what's his face the mouse flipper has stated that Tome of Battle was overpowered before, so like, of course Paizo didn't copy it, Paizo's made up of the same grog dumbfucks that hated it in the first place.
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Dec 22, 2018 00:19
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